Rainfall: 205.0mm

Temp High: 27.8^oC on 5th

Temp Low: -1.3^oC on 22nd

Temp Average: 11.2^oC

After last week's kingfishers using our pond, today we had this grey heron in the garden peering at our pond. There's nothing for him in there at the moment.

As I set out for a run today, this Carabus coriaceus beetle ran out in front of me on our driveway. This is a big beetle, ~3cm long.

A green sandpiper was patrolling the edge of the Bärenschlössle pond this morning. They usually fly off as soon as I open a window, but this one stayed for quite some time.

Meanwhile, the goldfinches have moved from our sunflowers to the flower beds. This juvenile is just beginning to show some red on his head.

Despite the fact that it has been one of the dryest years ever recorded, we've had a really good apple harvest this year. These ones are teasing me as they look fantastic but they're tantalisingly out of reach of all my tools so I'm going to attempt a balancing act with my tall ladders later this week.

We had a baby fire salamander in our cellar vent today. We put him outside near our pond - hopefully he can overwinter in one of the crevices around there.

Today is all about kingfishers. We had two visit the garden pond today - you can see in the photos that the first one had really pink legs whereas the second one had duller legs. Now I thought that we might get a single visit and once they realised there were no fish in there they wouldn't come back. How wrong I was. It seems we have some quite large insect larvae in there and the kingfishers will happily eat those. Our pond water is super-clear at the moment so they have some excellent hunting there. In the late afternoon, we had a closer look at the pond and we could see that we have a large number of snails in there too. I don't know how those got there, but we're happy to see them.

I got some nice photos of a spotted flycatcher today. Superficially, they're a drab bird, but these photos show that they're actually quite attractive.

We found this small plume moth, Amblyptilia acanthadactyla, in our bedroom last night. I kept it in a box overnight so I could take a photo in daylight. By coincidence, we found this Emmelina monodactyla plume moth in our bathroom this morning. Both these species hibernate so they may have come into the house for that - or they may have come in with some flowers from our garden.

The rain eased off this morning and we got a few things done in the garden. I spotted this new bug, Corizus hyoscyami, on a sage leaf.

I spent a few minutes watching birds and saw this common redstart hunting from a tree stump.

This buzzard landed on our dead tree stump today - although he was off as soon as he saw me taking photos.

We don't see wood warblers very often. I'm sure they're around much more than we see them. Today, this one was only a couple of metres away from me. I didn't have much time to get my camera ready, so they're not the best photos.

It continues to rain which is finally bringing the garden back to life.

This chiffchaff was puzzled by his first experience of getting wet in the grass.

Later in the afternoon, I spotted this pied flycatcher over on our triangle of land beside our main garden.

Here's something I wasn't expecting - a kingfisher peeking over the rim of our new garden pond. I'm going to put up an overhanging branch to encourage him, even though there's no fish in the pond.

The garden fence is also being enjoyed by lots of birds - we had 10 black redstarts in the garden today.

There was a huge swarm of flies over one of the nearby conifers which brought in a lot of birds. There are five birds in this photo - I'm pretty sure they're all blackcaps.

And the day was rounded off nicely by a visit from a spotted nutcracker - who was standing his ground despite being mobbed by several jays.

We had a lot of birds in the garden today, including some on their return migration - like this whinchat and spotted flycatcher.

There were a lot of blackcaps around the garden earlier in the year, but I only know that as we could hear them - we didn't actually see many up until today. This male and female were hopping about in our field maple. So as not to exclude our resident birds, here's a goldfinch eating seeds from our cosmos plant.